As I write this post on Wednesday night, Hurricane Milton is making landfall in Florida as a category three storm. 1.3 million people are without power, and forecasters warn that Milton could generate a storm surge with inundations of 12-13 feet. Many of you with businesses in Florida will have…
Articles Posted in Workplace Safety / Violence
An employee who wanted religious exception for the COVID-19 vaccine got called on it. Guess what happened next?
I’ll bet nowhere on your HR job description is there anything about serving as the religion police. But during the pandemic, some companies were pretty persnickety when considering employee requests for accommodations from getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Companies that applied heightened scrutiny did so at their own risk. In its…
POLL RESULTS (sort of): Only about half of employers still have COVID-19 policies
Although the vast majority of businesses implemented a written COVID-19 policy at one time or another, many have eliminated or stopped updating those policies. That’s what I learned from a poll I posted on Friday using SurveyMonkey, to which 227 people responded. However, in full disclosure, I didn’t realize at…
POLL: Does your business have a COVID-19 policy?
The other day, a partner asked me about COVID-19 policies and how clients may still implement them. Candidly, it wasn’t something I’d thought about for a while. Heck, I had to dust one off to remember all of the minutiae about vaccines, CDC guidelines, etc. There are a few states…
The CDC’s latest COVID-19 guidance treats unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals the same
In what it describes as “streamline[d] COVID-19 guidance,” the latest COVID-19 updates (here and here) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don’t appear to distinguish between individuals regardless of vaccination status. Potayto, potahto. While the CDC continues to promote the importance of being up to date with vaccination,…
CORRECTION: A healthcare employer agreed to pay over $10M to settle claims about a COVID shot mandate
On Friday, attorneys for over 500 current and former healthcare workers at a Midwest healthcare system announced that they had settled “the nation’s first classwide lawsuit” for employees alleging that they were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions from a COVID shot mandate. You can view a copy of…
A federal appellate court made it difficult to blame ’20-’21 large layoffs on COVID-19
Days since I’ve blogged about COVID-19 = 78 0. I promise(ish), this one will be interesting. And for those of you with businesses that had a mass layoff or plant closing because of COVID-19, it will be horrifying. You see, I just got finished reading a Fifth Circuit decision in…
Five days after the CDC reaffirmed its mask order for air travel, a federal judge nixed it nationwide
On April 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that its Mask Order (requiring face masks on planes into and within the United States) would continue to allow the CDC time to assess the potential impact of the rise of COVID-19 cases. Yesterday, however, a Florida federal…
It’s the return of the mack, err, masks.
You can take the boy of the ’90s, but… It’s been a minute — actually, about a month and a half — since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its COVID-19 mask guidance. The last update essentially guided most people to wear a mask based on personal…
Save yourself a call to your employment lawyer with this easy COVID-19 tool
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to help determine how long employees need to isolate, quarantine, or take other steps to prevent spreading COVID-19? Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled this Quarantine and Isolation Calculator to help people know what to do…